Pity Him Afterwards

He clicked the switch on, and a light blossomed at the head of the stairs. He climbed the stairs quickly — they were covered in gray carpet, badly worn in the center — and paused in the small second-floor hall.

There were four doors, two shut and two open. He investigated.

One of the open doors led to the bathroom. The other led to a bedroom with a double bed in it. But there was no one in the bed.

He opened the closed door on the right, and found the old man’s wife, asleep. She, too, woke up, just as the old man had, but her struggles were never as strong as his had been.

The closed door on the left led to a nursery, with a crib. But the crib was empty.

The madman was glad. He would have hated it if the crib had had an occupant.

But that was the full household. The old man and his wife, a married son or daughter and mate, and a grandchild. The younger couple and the grandchild must be away visiting. The madman was glad of it.

Though sometimes he thought the best thing would be to kill all the children. Then the human race would stop. But it was too much for one man to do. Though when he tried to argue with himself that children were for the most part better than adults — more honest, more willing to let a man alone, more apt to see truth — he could always counter the argument with the reminder that children, unless they are stopped, grow into adults.

He went back downstairs. The upstairs hall light let him see fairly well in the living room, well enough to go get the old man and tumble him out of the chair and drag him by the armpits across the room. He dragged the old man upstairs — a job that winded him again — and dumped him on the floor in the bedroom with his wife, and closed the door. Then he went back downstairs, switched on living-room lights, switched off the upstairs hall light, and unlocked the front door. He went outside and got the suitcase and brought it in with him, and locked the door again. Then he pulled the living-room shades, turned off the television set, and opened the suitcase on the floor.

He was safe now. Safe for tonight in this house. Safe for tomorrow with the contents of the suitcase. Shirts, socks, shoes, slacks, and a blue-gray suit. He could dress properly, and shave himself, and make himself presentable, and then he could go anywhere.

But go where?

He sat cross-legged on the floor, in front of the suitcase, and frowned as he tried to find an answer. All of his plans till now had been aimed at getting away from the asylum. He hadn’t thought of what to do next, what to do once he was safely free.

What could he do? Where could he go?

He couldn’t go home. He couldn’t go anywhere near home. But where else was there? He remembered enough about the outside world to know it was a world of papers and numbers. If he tried to get a job anywhere he would have to have a Social Security card, and they’d want a list of former employers, and they’d want to know if he was in the Army...

He sat cross-legged on the floor and looked at the suitcase, and tried to think what he would do tomorrow. He was on his own. No one would help him. He was alone, with the whole world ranged against him, all of them waiting for a chance to turn him over to Doctor Chax.

Maybe, if he could get out of the country, get to Mexico or Canada...

How much money did he have?

He pulled out the wallet he’d taken from the driver, and found it contained forty-three dollars. Not enough, forty-three dollars. He’d have to find more.

Maybe there was some money here in the house. Or he could find the old man’s keys and get into the garage, and get the money out of the cash register.

He put the forty-three dollars back in the wallet, and then he stopped, and looked hard at the wallet.

The wallet had more than money in it. The wallet had cards in it, all sorts of identification cards, in four plastic pockets.

He dragged all the cards out and read them, read every word. Studied them, turned them over, shuffled them back and forth in his hands. And he began to smile.

There was a driver’s license.

And a membership card in Actor’s Equity.

And a laminated reduced photostat of an Army discharge.

And a Social Security card.

He looked at the cards for a long while, and then he set them down gently on the floor, all in a row, and put the wallet down beside them, and he made a careful search of the suitcase.

There were only two things of interest in the suitcase, two large manila envelopes. In one of them were four letters, the sum total of the correspondence between the dead driver and the producer of the summer theater, in which the driver had been hired for the season. And in the other was a batch of glossy large black-and-white photographs of the dead driver in an actorish pose, arms crossed and head tilted, looking very dramatic, with dramatic lighting effects in the background. Scotch-taped to the back of each photo was a mimeographed resume of the dead driver’s theatrical career.